Tuesday, September 08, 2015

The books are offline again

For details on what has necessitated this change: First, there has been a sequel - Throne of Glass. Some of my research had already inspired some changes to that earlier book, but only the initial research made it in (the poetry, basically). I'd also overhauled The Arabs and Their Qur'anlast winter - so, now House's page-references had gone (progressively) wrong. More footnotes and digressions achieved self-awareness as independent projects, which therefore didn't require space here anymore. And, outside mine own efforts, one major event of the 2014-2015 era was the publication of Sean Anthony's parallel (and valuable) take on the Didascalia I mean, Doctrina Jacobi.

Throne of Glass had become anaemic in its last update, which took away more than it added. Since then over the past few months I've become more and more convinced that sura 12 belongs to this era (roughly 70 AH / 690 AD).

When I was revising Throne of Glass last May I'd become painfully aware of a lot of "white space" - both literal, in the sense of overspacing the top footnote-margins, and metaphorical, in the sense of unnecessary verbal blah blah blah. I fixed some of it in Throne of Glass but not all of it. As a result, my pagecount was inflated, at least for the size of page I was using - in both books. Also once I'd done sprucing up House of War, now the pagerefs in Throne were off too, so - another need to fix that latter.

And then there were those other little odds and ends that one always finds as one reviews one's own work. Now it's all over with: House has crept up to 135 pages of maintext, within 258 total; Throne has clawed back to 122, within 209.